David Hasselhoff becomes the unlikely face of campaign against all-male panels

He was once the face of hedonistic masculinity on Baywatch, whose mass popularity helped make him the most watched man on television.

Now the handsome features of David Hasselhoff are being used to ironically expose a less seductive aspect of maleness - plain old-fashioned sexism - as campaigners seek to promote more gender-balanced discussion panels amid rising criticism of debate forums that include only men.

The actor’s face, complete with him giving the thumbs up sign, is part of a Tumblr carrying the message “Congrats, You have an all-male panel” and aimed at embarrassing organisations that form discussion groups with no women panelists.

The Tumblr was created last year by Dr Saara Särmä, a Finnish artist and feminist researcher who was trying to inject some humour into her campaign against all-men panels.

Followers were invited to submit pictures and screen shots of all-male panels, illustrated with a “Hoffsome stamp” represented by Hasselhoff’s image.

Now the campaign is gaining new adherents after Sree Sreenivasan, digital director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. wrote on Facebook that he would neither participate in nor attend debates featuring male-only panels.

“My 2016 pledge to my daughter: I won't speak on any all-male panels (one-on-one chats are occasionally OK),” he wrote. “Upgraded now to include not ATTENDING all-male panels.”

Some of Australia’s most sought-after male conference speakers have also said they will boycott panel groups without women participants after setting up a website called No Thanks, Mate.

The move followed criticism of PayPal, the online payment company, for staging a panel on gender equality and inclusion in the workplace that consisted only of male participants.

Of 200 policy discussions on the Middle East organised by six of Washington’s leading think tanks during 2014, 65 per cent contained no women at all, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Women made up just 23 per cent of the speakers and moderators at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, while one in five of the panels staged included no female members - even though “women” was the third-most popular topic on the forum’s Twitter feed, with 10,000 tweets.

Recent US congressional hearings on last year’s historic nuclear deal with Iran called just six women out of140 witnesses, according to the Brookings Institution, despite female policy makers having played a major role in shaping the agreement.